That's what I am hoping for, the momentum...but I agree that the changes are very minor and most likely will not include nearly enough oversight. Any organization with this much power is not going to give any of it up easily.

I was driving down the road so I listened to his news conference on NPR, wondering if Katrina would be satisfied : )

He said that no damage had been done to anyone, like someone put in jail

I used to talk to Soviet emigree. He made some innocuous comments about the government, complaining. Someone heard, reported it, and made life hell so he left the country. If the NSA was using data to punish or reward people for political statements, then the program would be much worse.

Obama, FISA court judges, NSA people,..., are all in the same spot, if some terrorist event happens that could have been prevented by listening, then they'll be screwed.

Maybe Obama will make some reasonable changes. Maybe public response and Snowden's clever slow release of information will motivate Obama and congress to do more.

Someone asked Obama if there should be a deal with Snowden. Obama said that should be handled by Attorney General - he didn't say that Snowden is a criminal so maybe...

No Jerry, I am far from satisfied. You may be satisfied and be reassured by Obama's words, but your attempt at minimizing the damage done to our democracy is contributing to the problem. I can only hope hat no one that is reading this thread will be reassured by your words.

But, what damage has been done to our democracy? Have any elections been effected or people wrongly put in jail?

This could happen in the future so it's an important problem.

Money in politics has caused different people to be elected president and congressmen. Some of the biggest companies don't pay any U.S. income tax. The cost of healthcare has sky-rocketed to the point where it's screwing up the economy. We have outsourced a lot of business to other countries which is screwing up the economy...

"But, what damage has been done to our democracy? Have any elections been effected or people wrongly put in jail?"

I don't think elections have been affected, but I don't really know.Have people been wrongly put in jail? Probably, but I have no literature at the moment. Whistleblowers are being treated as traitors and freedom of the press is at great risk at the moment.

There are several ways in which this secret massive data collection has hurt our democracy. The main one is that anything of this scale, where citizens have lost this much privacy, supposedly - and probably originally so- to protect us from terrorists....should have been a national discussion.I repeat : This should have been a national discussion in which Americans weigh the pros and cons and decide if they agree to this kind of data mining, collecting and storing. The discussion should have involved what is done with the data, if we agree to have it collected. The discussion should have involved what can and cannot be done with it. None of that happened.

I realize that many are completely ok with not being part of the decision making, letting a few do it all for them, but something of this scale should have never happened without the citizen's consent.What will happen to all this information remains to be seen but I don't blame those that call this effort "Orwellian". I hope but don't trust that a number of people will end up jailed without due process because of this.

"The panel’s experts concluded that “there has been no instance in which N.S.A. could say with confidence that the outcome would have been different” in a terror investigation without the collection of the telephone data. “Moreover, now that the existence of the program has been disclosed publicly, we suspect that it is likely to be less useful still.”

There is an odd logic only "intelligence" people understand

The illegal surveilance isn't useful but we have to keep it secret or it will be less useful?

You have to root for Snowden because he's outwitting the lot of them : )